How would you use a Manning MEAP Book?

MEAP is abbreviated for Manning Early Access Program where you get early access to the book, chapter by chapter, as soon as they become available. By subscribing to MEAP chapters, you get an opportunity to participate in the most sensitive, final piece of the publishing cycle by offering feedback to the author. Reader feedback to the author is welcome in the Author Online forums. After all chapters are released, you will be able to download the complete edited ebook. If you order the print edition, we will ship it to you upon release, direct from the bindery, weeks before it is widely available elsewhere.

Javaranch and Manning are together running a MEAP promo/giveaway which is in addition to the ongoing book promo. To participate in this promo all you need to do is to reply to this thread with your experiences of how a MEAP helped you in the past or if you havent tried MEAP before, how would you make use of a MEAP if you were to get one.

Manning Marketing employees would then pick one of the most creative responses and the winner would get to choose the MEAP of their choice for FREE.

Manning authors are most welcome to share their experiences but are not eligible to participate in the book giveaway.

I bought the Spring In Action Third Edition through the MEAP program. As part of that purchase I got the online version of the Second edition for free. That book was a godsend for me. We were the first team to adopt Spring , and now we are moving towards building new code in Spring in the entire company, and I am kind of one of the "experts". Before I read the book, Spring was like magic to me. How does autowiring work? Magic! How does code weaving work? Magic! As they say, "One man's science is another man's magic", and Spring in Action helped me understand the science behind the magic.

Unfortunately, there is lot of conflicting information about what's the best way to use Spring is. Spring In Action is very useful because it tells you what the right way of doing things is. Having early access to the Third edition (in addition to the full copy of Second edition) made it even more useful because I had early access to the latest solutions. I would try to look up in the Third Edition to find the latest way of doing something. If that chapter wasn't published, I'd look it up in the Second edition.

I'm not eligible to win because I'm on the book promo team, but I've had good experiences with MEAP. I prefer to read paper books in general. The exception is when a paper book doesn't exist yet. Which is what happens with MEAP. The book isn't ready yet, but you get to read chapters as they come out. I also like that you can post errata online and have them fixed/clarified before the book prints.

My coolest MEAP experience is when I asked for a book to review from Manning a bit too early and got a MEAP instead. I reviewed it and part of my quote was on the back cover. Way cool!

My best MEAP experience was with the book MongoDB in Action.
Great book, great product, i could not wait for the paper book to be printed to discover all the features of this nosql database.
And there is nothing as efficient as reproducing the book example to learn how to use the product.
Just after I was able to start implementing my own use cases with MongoDB.
Thanks Manning !

I have bougth some MEAP books, like Restlet in Action, Mule in Action Second Edition, Spring Integration, Activiti, Sonar... All this book in MEAP, when this books have been released I can got the final version. I was really greatful with service and also with the content. The content explained in each book is very simple I think that everyone can understand.

For me, the best aspect of the Manning MEAP books program is that generally it's a very competitive price for the bundle of both P-Book and E-Book.
That way I have the "bookshelf" copy for the house, but also a convenient e-copy on the tablet to carry everywhere.

Having early access to the preliminary E-Book versions is a nice bonus, though.

We are all so happy that you participated in the thread. I will be contacting you ALL for a prizes. We hope that you will then spread the word about the program to get others involved! I will work with the Ranch to receive your names and emails.